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(Policeman hauls away a protester from the women’s rights protest group Femen as Pope Benedict XVI leads his Angelus prayer from the nearby window of his private apartment in Saint Peter’s Square at the Vatican January 13, 2013. REUTERS/Giampiero Sposito)

The Vatican underlined its opposition to gay adoption on Sunday as same-sex marriage supporters staged a topless protest in front of the pope in St. Peter’s Square.

The Vatican paper L’Osservatore Romano published a response to an Italian court’s rejection of an appeal by a father who feared his son would not have a balanced upbringing if he lived with his mother and her female partner.

The Court of Cassation ruled it was “mere prejudice” to assume that living with a homosexual couple could be detrimental for a child’s development. While the gay rights group Arcigay called it a “historic ruling” for Italy, where it is illegal for gay couples to adopt, Catholic leaders were quick to defend the traditional family unit.

The Vatican has become increasingly vocal against homosexual marriage in recent months. Pope Benedict strongly reaffirmed the Church’s opposition to it in December, saying heterosexual marriage had an indispensable role in society.

(Activists from the women’s rights group Femen protest as Pope Benedict XVI leads his Angelus prayer from the window of his private Vatican apartment on January 13, 2013. REUTERS/Giampiero Sposito)

While the pope was giving his weekly address on Sunday, four women from the Ukrainian Femen group who were in the crowd, pulled off their T-shirts to reveal the slogan “In Gay we Trust” painted over their bodies.

Screaming “Homophobes shut up” as the pope started his Angelus blessing, they provoked angry reactions from pilgrims in St. Peter’s Square. One woman in the crowd started hitting the activists with an umbrella, calling them “diabolical”.

Italian police grabbed the protesters and pulled them away from the crowd.

In Paris, hundreds of thousands of people protested against President Francois Hollande’s planned legalization of same-sex marriage.

(Activists from the women’s rights protest group Femen struggle against police at their protest in Saint Peter’s Square outside the window of Pope Benedict’s private Vatican apartment on January 13, 2013. REUTERS/Giampiero Sposito)

L’Osservatore Romano, the 151-year-old mouthpiece of the Holy See, ran an editorial that sought to play down the court ruling, saying that children often grow up in difficult circumstances without a mother or father.

“But no one believes that these situations should be created just because in some cases they don’t cause damage,” wrote Adriano Pessina, director of bioethics at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart.

“The human is the masculine and the feminine … the monogamous family is the ideal place to learn the meaning of human relations and is the environment where the best form of growth is possible,” he wrote.

He reaffirmed the Vatican’s view that no one has the “right” to children that he said gay couples who want to adopt are claiming.

I have nothing against the gays, and Lesbians. But these groups that violate the laws in this fashion, make it harder on the ones that try to work with society, and give them all bad names. If these people would work through legal means, and quit with the vulgar displays, and dominating actions, they could get much more people to support them and get a lot more things done in a more civil manner. Then Nudity, the dictating what classes will teach, and so on, need to stop, or they will continue to push more people like myself away from their wants. The Vatican is corrupt enough to be given little thought onto its position, even many of its own members are going against the Churches wishes on many issues. It is only the Liberal media that gives them a whole lot of play, because they know this will drum up more anti-christian support for their mindless followers.

Do you mean “hopeless” like thousands of families fighting for change in an institution that turned a blind eye on child-abusing priests? Or did you mean that fighting AIDS in Africa is “hopeless” because the Vatican is too righteous to condone contraception?

The “evidence” that gay couples can’t provide a healthy upbringing, lies solely on the dogmatic utterances of an institution whose views haven’t changed in millennia. Science – which does more for mankind in a day than all churches combined in millennia – says something very different. So yeah, trying to talk sense into someone who ruins people’s lives because they believe in Santa Claus can make one feel “hopeless”. And that picture is exactly what frustration and despair looks like. Don’t talk as if these girls were enjoying it. There are definitely not the perverts in this story.